Perhaps there is no better place to soak in the re-release of Taylor Swift’s 1989 (available on October 27) than in the apartment where she shot much of the original album’s promotional material. And for one dedicated Swiftie, that might actually be possible: The Manhattan duplex where the singer took numerous polaroid photos—which helped define the visual aesthetic for her first major pop record—recently hit the market for $3.7 million.
When it was originally released in 2014, each physical copy of the three-time Grammy Award–winning album came with 13 random film photos of the singer (there were 65 in total). The out-of-focus, sepia-tinted images complemented the album’s cover, which showed another polaroid of Swift wearing a seagull-printed sweatshirt and her signature bold red lip. Aesthetically, they played to themes expressed on the record: city living, young adulthood, and nostalgia. As such, they were shot all around the Big Apple—a place that Swift welcomes listeners to on the first track of the album. Some were taken on the ferry, others in a recording studio, and some at 874 Broadway.
At the time, the apartment was the home of Tannaz Hazemi, a film director who worked on the photoshoot. It’s currently being sold by Sarah Johnson (daughter of billionaire businessman Charles B. Johnson), who bought the Swift-graced third-floor unit as well as another unit on the fourth floor, and combined them into one home filled with light.
Many of the features that can be seen in the 1989 photos are still preserved to this day. The unit’s dark wood trim encircling both the south-facing and the west-facing windows is visible in one photo of the “Blank Space” singer perched delicately on the back of a scalloped sofa. The most obvious connector, however, are the lyrics “If you leave me, I’m coming with you,” written on the inside of the unit’s door and seen in an image of Swift sitting cross-legged on the floor. In 2019, Alternative Press was still trying to deduce whether it was in fact Swift who had written the lyrics, which come from the song “Buffalo 666” by Every Time I Die, or whether it was simply a coincidence of the location. No matter the case, the iconic scribbling is still there.
However, many of the more grungy, industrial elements of the unit—such as the distressed walls and exposed brick—have since disappeared. According to Zillow records, the third-floor unit was last sold in 2014 (presumably to Johnson) for $2.6 million. While the old-school loft aesthetic remains intact, comparison between both iterations of the listing photos show a more rustic take on the style now compared to when Swift visited.
